How Candidate Experience Influences Your Employer Branding to a Great Extent

The concept of employer branding generally revolves around building initiatives and optimizing processes to keep existing employees of the company happy and engaged. However, many companies pay less or no attention to the potential hires/candidates, who also play a pivotal role in the branding of an organization.

Although a candidate may be perfect for the job, he/she might still turn down the offer because of a bad interview experience. The unhappy candidate, thus, forms opinions or judgments about the organization as a whole and discusses the experience with friends, family, and colleagues. Sometimes, the same conversation carries on to social media as a medium to vent out frustration, which is read by thousand odd people, who create judgments and with the blink of an eye, there goes your reputation!

Few interesting stats that will make you reconsider your Employer Branding Strategy

Change of heart, leads to change of mind?

Change of heart, leads to change of mind?

Nearly 83% of candidates who have had a poor experience have changed their minds about accepting an offer, even if compensation packages are high and benefits are great. However, 87% of candidates with a positive candidate experience can change their mind about a company they were reluctant on joining.

Thanks to Social Media, an opinion about your organization can go viral

72% of candidates share their experience on social media platforms or with someone directly, the action ends up being the talk amongst masses – for better or worse! In one study, 62% of candidates research companies on social media, 76% of applicants research LinkedIn by looking up current employees of the company.

Hiring Process troubles!

A candidate population of around 53% found the employer’s hiring process lacking efficiency, professionalism and consistency. On the contrary, companies with positive employer branding, and good reputation attract several potential candidates who want to work with them. Hiring managers receive twice the number of applications that address hiring challenges of a company, thus lowering overall hiring costs.

So, what does it take to Build a Candidate Experience that Connects?

Recruiters, being the direct point of contact with candidates, follow a ritual in order to give candidates a great experience, making them eager in wanting to be onboard.

The crux of the matter lies in the recruiting process, which is the first step to creating an impression, whether great or not, the news travels faster than the speed of light, so it better be a good one!

A hiring strategy must include consistent communication to update and engage the candidate about their application status and create a positive experience throughout the hiring lifecycle. Having said that, we understand the struggles of a recruiter and that’s when technology comes to the rescue.

With technology taking over organizational processes, the recruitment life cycle has transformed over the years. Right from sourcing to onboarding, we’ve definitely come a long way. However, companies in India are not fully aware of the importance of candidate experience. While there are customer service teams to look after customer experience, similarly candidate experience needs attention. Having said that, who’s managing and measuring candidate experience?

At Hexagon we use technology to bring automation to crucial recruitment processes and put visibility into every step of talent acquisition at our client’s fingertips. Here is how we do it?

Smarter Sourcing

Recruitment is constantly evolving at a rapid rate and recruiters are discovering several techniques to optimize their sourcing skills. The traditional methods of looking up at job portals, emailing and calling are still used, however, smart recruiters are leveraging technology to source candidates faster and assess their true role fitment.

Our platform is capable of sourcing resumes from different job portals with a single click. Candidate profiles are further filtered automatically to match company and role fit DNA accurately. This helps our client to avoid inviting candidates for an interview that maybe not fit for the role advertised.

Interview Management

No show and dropout rates are concerning factors that make life difficult for the recruiter and the hiring manager, so it is important to streamline communication, follow-ups, reminders, alerts, and notifications for the hiring team. Hexagon’s technology-driven platform is built with an interview management system, that enables recruiters to schedule interviews, send communications and conduct interview surveys. At every stage of the interview process, our platform sends notifications and alerts to the recruitment team so that an interview schedule is never delayed and you do not lose out on a good resource.

Once a personal interview is scheduled with the hiring manager, welcoming the candidate and ensuring they are made comfortable is your first step to making an impression. Some basic fundamentals for a great candidate experience involve informing the reception about candidate arrival and offering tea or coffee during the waiting time. It is a nice way to make the candidate feel welcomed and looked after.

Streamlined Offer Rollout

For candidate engagement and employer branding, it is of prime importance to stay at the top of industry demands for skill sets as well as average compensation offered in different regions. Our platform allows employers the access to updated market trends and talent costs in order to offer competitive salary packages to selected candidates.

Offer Management

Once the candidate has accepted the offer and begun the notice period, usually being 3 months, it is very important to touch base and connect with candidates during this time. Three months is a long enough time to hunt for more opportunities or a change of mind to settle for a better offer.

With the help of technology, we can regularly communicate with candidates actively and passively, as well as keep an eye open on their job hunt activities. Our technology platform also records the observations on a weekly basis, that give accurate insights about a candidate’s probability of joining a company or not. It also allows the recruiter to look for an alternative resource in case the candidate chooses not to join.

Employee Engagement

A happy employee is a highly productive employee. Existing employees of a company are definitely a priority. With the emphasis on employee engagement and job satisfaction discussions being a fad in recent times, current employees need to be looked after. Our platform offers inbuilt employee engagement surveys, interview experience feedback surveys and other questionnaires to gauge overall employee satisfaction. This, in turn, aids the improvisation and optimization of HR processes and adds value to the overall employer branding.

To conclude, it is necessary to consider all aspects of your employer branding strategy, especially the treatment of your candidates who could be potential employees or customers for your business. The idea of automating processes with technology-driven solutions is a surefire way to build a successful employer branding strategy, but also improve and streamline hiring process, that eventually make a positive impact on your bottom line.

Hexagon’s technology-based solution RocketHire, is a one-stop-shop platform that manages hiring demand, automates workflow and provides real-time recruitment insights.RocketHire helps recruiters and hiring managers to track, monitor and analyze the recruitment life cycle with great ease and efficiency.

Let us help you overcome your talent acquisition challenges, get in touch with us for a demo session.